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SpaceShipOne Flight Completed Successfully
knothead99 writes "CNN is reporting the successful liftoff of SpaceShipOne from a runway in the Mojave desert. Around 10:30 EDT the craft will reach an altitude of 50,000 feet and they'll separate from White Knight and ignite the rocket for space entry. More information can also be found at the Mojave Airport website" Update: 06/21 15:36 GMT by S : An MSNBC story confirms that SpaceShipOne 'glided safely back to Earth, landing back at the Mojave Airport' around 8.15AM PST.
So they made it. Congrats. Now how high would they have to go to enter orbit?
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
This is a great day for man. I firmly believe that our future lies in some day getting off this Earth and spreading throughout space. As such, the accomplishment we have witnessed today was great. This heralds a new era of spaceflight, not one in which governments spend billions, but one in which small companies pay millions, to get into orbit. At this rate, in ten years, commercial space flight might be a reality - and space exploitation (and as a side-effect, human colonization of space) would occur. See any number of novels by Stephen Baxter for more details.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
My favorite update so far is this one:
1250 GMT (8:50 a.m. EDT)
The International Space Station will be flying high above Mojave at approximately the time SpaceShipOne is scheduled to launch. The Expedition 9 resident crew will attempt to photograph the launch and contrail.
The ISS crew, likely to be remembered as caretakers of NASA's failed scheme, will be witness to the future of space exploration. Poetic, isn't it?
It also occurs to me that if something bad happens to the Russian space program, the ISS crew may have to wait for Rutan's future orbital project, if they hope to get home at all...
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Remember, these are the people who said Columbia was traveling at 25 times the speed of light when it disintegrated.
Again, Mach speed changes as a function of altitude! Mach is dependent on airpressure, the speed of sound changes with it.
And CNN does not seem to employ anyone who understands science in the least.
Lots of people have been asking about how SC can take SS-1 and turn it into something that can get people into LEO and beyond.
One option is that perhaps they won't, and they will go back to the drawing board to come up with a totally new design. That doesn't seem right to me; Bert is a smart guy, and they have put a lot of resources and time into this, would they just throw it away.
My thought is that they will scale things up and add another stage.
In essence, what Burt has done is design a rocket where each stage is designed to suite it's part of the flight, and then return in one piece. At the moment they have a stage to get high in the atmosphere, and a stage to get into space, why not add a new stage to get you to LEO and beyond.
If WK and SS-1 (SS-2?) were scaled up, is there any reason why a third stage couldn't piggy-back on SS-1 to 100km and then detach and boost into LEO. Both the previous stages would then land and wait for the return of the orbiter. Each would have it's own crew (or perhaps a really good auto-pilot).
Basically you end up with the advantages of a multi-stage rocket (or the shuttle) but with completely reusable stages.
Have I completely missed something? Would the seperation at 100km be too difficult? Would there be too much mass for it to be feasible?
Paul
p.s. Well done to everyone at Scaled. An amazing achievement, no matter what the "but I want a pony!" crowd might say. This has been one small step in the right direction, on a long journey.
Paul Leader
Because, of course, the government's 3% failure rate is much better than private industry could achieve.
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He seems to 'crave' publicity with his projects.
Of all the X-Prize competitors, Scaled Composites have been the most media-shy. He receives lots of publicity for his projects because they are pretty, innovative, and successful.
Also I heard on Cnn interview of Rutan that he didn't develop this rocket with the X prize in mind.
They have spent more than double the prize money developing Tier One. They'd have to be pretty stupid to be in it just to win the X-Prize. While it would be nice to recoup $10m by winning the prize, they will continue their developement whether they win or not. (Mass fatalities excluded.)
Just another contest bought out by the richest guy.
Yes. That was the point. Encourage the private sector to invest in commercial space travel by rewarding the smart investor with $10m.
Really. I'm sure you can find out more on CNN.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
'Nevertheless, I can't see the justification for this kind of thing while people starve right here on Earth.'
I take it that you donate every single penny of your disposable income to those starving people, rather than waste it on frivolous uses like internet access, beer and vacations?
No, didn't think so.
Spaceflight gets interesting when you can actually put stuff into orbit. So that once it goes up, it stays up without using more fuel. That means you have to get the rocket flying at close to Mach 25. Then once you've gotten up to Mach 25, if you want to land again, you've got to slow back down to zero, which means getting rid of a heck of a lot of kinetic energy. That's why the Space Shuttle needs those notorious problematic thermal tiles, to dissipate the ferocious amount of heat created by that slowdown. Think your car's brakes get hot driving down a mountain? Try it from orbit.
SpaceShip One's propaganda made it sound like they'd beaten NASA by developing better reentry technology that didn't need thermal tiles. In reality, they didn't need thermal tiles because they never reached anywhere near orbital speed, so they didn't have all that heat to dissipate. If they ever build an orbital craft, they'll have to deal with reentry heat just like everyone else has.
SpaceShip One is about as close to that as the Wright Brothers flyer is to a jet airliner. The amount of technical development (and expenditure) needed to get a reusable vehicle in orbit makes what's been done so far look pretty trivial. Space Ship One got about as far into space as the Redstone rockets of the 1950's.
I don't mean to belittle the accomplishment but it shouldn't be overestimated either. It's a step, an important step, but a baby step, there are a lot more to go.
At this point, I think it's pretty safe to assume that anybody who reads Slashdot knows at least the basic history of the Apollo program. As such, there's really no reason for anyone to continually add footnotes about it, and so it's equally safe to assume anyone who harps on the lack of said footnotes is only doing so to try to score cheap debate points.
Also, I disagree with the assumption that future orbital flights will be substantially cheaper just because launches with Spaceship One were cheaper. No major space program has ever had a reason to compete in this niche (manned reuseable suborbital vehicles), so the field was still wide open for someone to come in with a good idea. By contrast, there have been a lot of people exploring options for cheap reuseable orbital flight with no results, so someone coming into the field from private industry will need either an equal investment of sweat equity or an extremely unconventional bright idea that all the experts would have missed.
Microsoft delenda est!
He proved it could be done. No matter what becomes of Space Ship One, this is a crowning achievement and could pave the way for further advancement.
Any research like this is well worth doing, even if the end benefits are not immediate.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs